1) Any time you see an e-mail that says “forward this on to ‘10′ (or however many) of your friends”, “sign this petition”, or “you’ll get bad luck” or “you’ll get good luck” or “you’ll see something funny on your screen after you send it” or whatever. . it almost always has an e-mail tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and e-mails of those folks you forward to.  The host sender is getting a copy each time it gets forwarded and then is able to get lists of ‘active’ e-mail addresses to use in SPAM e-mails or sell to other spammers.  Even when you get e-mails that demand you send the e-mail on if you’re not ashamed of God/Jesus. . .that is e-mail tracking, and they are playing on our conscience.  These people don’t care how they get your e-mail addresses. . .just as long as they get them.   Also, e-mails that talk about a missing child or a child with an incurable disease “how would you feel if that was your child”. . . .e-mail tracking.  Ignore them and don’t participate!

2) Almost all e-mails that ask you to add your name and forward on to others are similar to that mass letter years ago that asked people to send business cards to the little kid in Florida who wanted to break the Guinness Book of Records for the most cards.  All it was, and all any of this type of e-mail is, is a way to get names and ‘cookie’ tracking information for telemarketers and spammers. . . .to validate active e-mail accounts for their own profitable purposes.

You can do your Friends and Family members a GREAT favor by sending this information to them.  You will be providing a service to your friends.  And you will be rewarded by not getting thousands of spam e-mails in the future!

Do yourself a favor and STOP adding your name(s) to those types of listing regardless how inviting they might sound!  Or make you feel guilty if you don’t! It’s all about getting e-mail addresses and nothing more.

 You may think you are supporting a GREAT cause, but you are NOT!
 
Instead, you will be getting tons of junk mail later and very possibly a virus attached!  Plus, we are helping the spammers get rich!  Let’s not make it easy for them!
 
ALSO:  e-mail petitions are NOT acceptable to Congress or any other organization….i.e. social security, etc.  To be acceptable, petitions must have a “signed signature” and full address of the person signing the petition, so this is a waste of time and you are just helping the e-mail trackers.

Microsoft has been working closer with phone manufacturers this time around. In previous version of Windows Mobile, software manufacturers had to write their software for a vast number of phones. This time, there will be 3 classes. The large, touch screen phones, the slide out keyboard phones and the small “candybar” style phones. This is good news for those writing apps for the mobile platform. It is bad however for owners of earlier Windows Mobile phones. Windows Mobile 6.5 will recieve future updates but will not be upgradable.

For those that have a phone contract coming due, you may want to wait to see what the new devices have to offer.

If you not sure if Windows Mobile is right for you, contact Fast for advice and opinions on the different platforms available.

Fast is a computer consulting company located in Minneapolis, MN and specialized in Contact Management and syncronization with all the different mobile devices.

CRM solutions have either been the driving force or a disaster for many businesses over the years. The earliest implementations were little more than a database of supplier and customer addresses and contact information with limited notation/tracking functionality. The latest applications seem to have all the bells and whistles (and then some) to make access of information easier than ever for employees within an organisation.
There are many various flavours of what can be termed Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications — from entry-level contact management solutions, to salesforce automation, all the way up to full-blown packages that interface with inventory systems and back-end accounting packages to give the users full “at-a-glance” histories of their entire transaction with suppliers, customers, staff, and production/assembly plants.

Fast can help sort through the fog to help you find the right package. Check out this article for more information.
http://bit.ly/cEKc7X

While there are many companies offerring Online Contact Management solutions, Fast has tried to search through them and find the best. There are two basic catagories to these solutions. Free and those with a monthly fee.

The free solutions tested were Google Apps and Zoho CRM. Both offer basic data fields, shared calendars and shared document storage. They are a great solution for a small business that really only needs to SHARE information.

The solutions which charge a monthly fee offer some distict differences from the their free counterparts. First, they offer much more customization to the fields of information that they store allowing them to become much more specific to a perticular need. Second, and most importantly, they offer a “history” of items completed with a specific contact. This is crucial when multiple people are dealing wit the same contact. This will show when an email or letter was sent or when a meeting was held and what took place. This is critical information as a business gets larger and busier.

Some of the other benefits to the monthy plans are the additional software they provide. An example offers ACT Online, Word and Outlook. The local cost to have this software is over $750 per user while he online fee is $30/month with a $50 set-up fee.

As you decide which system is right for you, these are just some of the issues to keep in mind.

Iconsoft, PhonEx dialer and contct management makes your windows mobile device operate as easy as the iPhone. Check it out at www.iconsoft.com

Now dialing is easy fast and completely done by hand, no stylus needed.

jk (Mobile Tech Expert) posted 9/2/2005 | Comments (917)
One of the failings of iTunes is the inability to copy music files from the iPod to your iTunes library without third party utilities. I suspect Apple did this by design to keep we iTunes customers from copying our DRMed music. I recently rebuilt my Tablet PC and wanted to copy my 18 GB of music residing on my iPod over to the Tablet so my library would be filled again. A gotcha lurks when you install iTunes and your iPod onto a new computer because iTunes is set by default to replace your iPod library with the desktop library the first time they are partnered. Of course since your iTunes library is empty it promptly wipes out your precious music on the iPod leaving you with no library anywhere. Ouch. There is a simple way to prevent this and also copy your iPod library to the desktop without any third party software.

iTunes won’t let you configure the iPod to prevent the auto-syncing until AFTER the iPod is connected to iTunes. It is imperative you do not partner the two libraries when asked by iTunes, tell it no so the auto-sync doesn’t wipe your iPod clean leaving you a blubbering idiot in the process. Once the iPod is connected and set to operate as a hard disk on your PC exit iTunes. Go to the iTunes directory on the Windows machine (My Music/ iTunes by default) and delete the XML file and the ITL file which is the library database installed when you hooked up the iPod.

With those files deleted the iTunes library is now empty as it should be for this process. Navigate over to the iPod in My Computer and make sure you set the folder options to show hidden files. Find the hidden folder called iPod Control and even though it’s filled with many files with nonsensical names this is in fact the music library on the iPod. Copy that folder to anywhere on the PC which will take a while if you have a lot of songs. When this copy is complete open iTunes and in the Files menu tell iTunes to Add a Folder and select the iPod Control folder you just copied over. You could actually do this straight from the iPod without copying them all over but I was nervous something might happen to the library on the iPod so I copied them first.

Before you do the Add a Folder mentioned above make sure iTunes is set to manage your library and to copy files when adding to iTunes. This is important to get iTunes to organize the songs using the ID3 tags in the song files you just copied over. That’s it- you have all your iPod songs now properly copied to the desktop and nicely organized and in the iTunes database. Note that when you first connect the iPod to the computer after you set iTunes to auto-sync it will wipe the iPod clean and sync the new iTunes library back to the iPod. It seems like a silly step but since the two libraries are the same anyway it doesn’t hurt anything, it just takes time. It is necessary to make sure the databases are identical. Once it’s done you can delete the iPod Control folder you copied on the desktop since iTunes has copied the songs into it’s own directory tree.

Users must be careful to read the agreements when surfing around Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites. Many of the polls and games and things that require you to intall something, also install a toolbar or other item that can, after a while, start to slow your computer considerably. If you decide to install anything from these sites it is sometimes wise to remove any additional items installed once you are finished with the poll or game.

Now, for all you Google Calendar users, you can have all you appointments sent to your Blackberry, Pocket PC, iPhone or almost any other PDA Phone.  This service is free and is easy to set up.

 If you currently use Outlook, you can upload your data to Google and then sync it wirelessly to your device.  For those of you with ACT or Outlook, you can make this upload happen automatically with the addition of a very inexpensive piece of software.

 This useful tool has always been available for a monthly fee but, now with Google, it can be accomplished for free.  There are still limitations to what Google offers but, for the small, one person office, it is a fantastic solution.  As little as 2 years ago, the only way to offer this solution meant  deploying an exchange server and administering the whole thing.  The cost of such an endeavor was far out of the reach of most small businesses.

 If this is something that sounds of interest to your business, contact FAST for a free consultation to see what solutions are available to your business.

Well, I’m sure that you have all heard and read about the terrible virus that was going to infect millions of PC based computers.  While the virus is exceptionally tricky, a properly “patched” computer is relatively safe.  Proper patching comes from installing windows updates when your computer prompts you to do so.

This virus originated somewhere in the Ukraine and came about in October of 2008.  Symantec was the first to raise red flags about it and Microsoft released the patch soon afterward.  The virus attempts to exploit a file sharing process in all Windows 200, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Server 2003 computers.  If the ptch has been applied, it can attempt to gain access by forcing passwords but this method has a much smaller risk.

If you machine gets infected, simply turn of you system restore, download and run the latest malicious software removal tool from Microsoft and then apply the patch from Microsoft to prevent future intrusions by the virus.  In its basic form, Conflicker is more of a Malware than it is a virus.  It usually prevents your computer from getting Windows Updates and Virus Updates.  If left unattended, it can attempt to install a more dangerous variant which is believed to read passwords and transmit back to malicious parties.

If you are experiencing problems with this virus, contact Fast.

I saw the ad on TV for the Windows Live Photo Gallery last night.  Decided to download it and give it a try.  The photo stitch part of the program is pretty cool.  I don’t like how it organizes pictures as my photos are all organized into folders and it wants to organize by dates and things like that.  I can see it will be a nice addition to my photo software.  Here’s where to get it:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8897EE16-0ECB-46A5-8918-E26D84B91214&displaylang=en